of his fellow-men or be mindful of the world’s censure or approval.  Nor can one well quarrel with what he had now to say on many a subject, visionary and enthusiast as he always was, and given over to mediaeval views and preachments, and to abounding moral and ethical exhortation.  Like Carlyle’s, his voice was that of one crying in the wilderness, and yet in the industrial and social condition of Britain at the era there was need of just such appeals for regeneration and reform as Ruskin strenuously uttered, accompanied by indignant rebukes of grossness, vulgarity, and meanness, as manifested in masses of the people.  If in his strivings after amelioration he was too denunciatory as well as too radical, we must remember the temper and manner of the man, and recognize how difficult it was in him, or in any iconoclast who scorned modern science as Ruskin scorned it, to reconcile the age of steam and industrial machinery, which he spurned and would have none of, with the views he held of Christianity, morals, and faith.  His views on political economy, which he treated neither as an art nor a science, might be perverse and wrong-headed, and his method of adapting prophetic and apostolic principles to the practice of every-day life utterly impracticable; but the virtues he counselled the nation to manifest, and the graces he enjoined of truthfulness, justice, temperance, bravery, and obedience, were qualities needed to be cultivated in his time, with a fuller recognition of and firmer trust in God and His right of sway in the world He had created.

What Ruskin’s economic views were, and what his relations to the industrial and social problems of his time, most readers of our author know, are mainly to be found in “Fors Clavigera,” a series of letters to working-men, covering the years 1871-84, and in his early essays on political economy, “Unto this Last” (1860), and “Munera Pulveris” (1863).  “Unto this Last” appeared in its original form in the pages of the “Cornhill Magazine,” then edited by Thackeray, and our author speaks confidently of it as embodying his maturest and worthiest thoughts on social science.  The work, which will be found the key to Ruskin’s economic gospel, embraces four essays, treating successively of the responsibilities and duties of those called to fill all offices of national trust and service; of the true sources of a nation’s riches; of the right distribution of such riches; and of what is meant by the economic terms,—­value, wealth, price, and produce.  Under these several heads, Ruskin expresses his conviction that co-operation and government are in all things the law of life, while the deadly things are competition and anarchy.  Whatever errors the book[3] contains—­and the author’s unconscious arrogance and dogmatism made him blind to them—­his views were set forth with his accustomed vigor and eloquence, and in the honest belief that he was more than fundamentally right.  It was for such helpful work as this,